JenSense strangely beats ProBlogger ... how?

I noticed today that JenSense has won SearchEngineJournal's 2005 "Search Engine Blogs Awards", beating out several high profile blogs, including ProBlogger. Now don't get me wrong, I read and enjoy both ProBlogger and JenSense, but I simply cannot understand how people voted. Without being rude about it, I simply cannot think of a single area where JenSense is better than ProBlogger. Both authors are clearly knowledgeable, but ProBlogger is far and away the more interesting read. JenSense simply seems (sorry Jen!) boring by comparison.

I think part of it is a personal bias towards design. Jen's blog is so ... plain. I know, I know, whitespace is the new black and there isn't enough of it around, but c'mon, there's got to be more to a website than the words. Why not just use default fonts and no CSS at all? Perhaps this simplicity is good for attracting the business-types, I don't know. I also think the main body column in JenSense is too wide and find reading it quite tiresome. That could however simply be my uselessness rearing its ugly head.


My final gripe is that JenSense is much more 'news' oriented. A simple glance at the last 15 entries on each blog clearly demonstrates this. (I started to type out the 15 recent entries of each blog but quickly got fed up. So I took some screenshots instead.)

Here are JenSense's last 15 entries:


And here are ProBlogger's last 15 entries:


I think these two shots are pretty illuminating, but if you don't agree a quick read through those entries may change your mind. On re-reading this post it may appear that I am being overly critical of JenSense. This isn't my intention. My goal was simply to understand how ProBlogger could rank so many places behind JenSense. (I am more careful about these things since facing the wrath of a couple of righteous commenters a few days ago!)

Update: On further reflection (which I should have done before posting ) I think the fact that JenSense is more focussed on Adsense while ProBlogger has a wider coverage makes JenSense less interesting to me. The narrower focus means that Jen covers more of the minutiae which by definition is less engrossing to the casual reader such as yours truly.

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